


surf where white bones twist

by oriflamme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Body Horror, Crockertier, F/F, Great Empress Ro-Lal, Grimbark, Grimdark, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Long May She Rain, Medical Experimentation, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Multi, Organic technology, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Palestuck Exchange, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 13:57:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7621027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Roxy kills the Condesce and inherits the Empire, she also inherits her monsters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	surf where white bones twist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KarrinBlue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KarrinBlue/gifts).



Roxy finds them in one of the deep vaults, sunk deep in the flooded bowels of the _Battleship Condescension._

It's been almost a year since she killed the Condesce - a year of scrambling around, dodging assassination attempts and trying to persuade the Empire not to tear itself apart at the seams as every salt-sipping, condescending, overly-entitled violetblood tried to claim a planet to lord it over - and she and Dirk haven't had the time to inventory even a fraction of the Condesce's horded riches, monetary or otherwise. They grew up on one of the empire's drowned worlds, conquered and reformatted on the Empress's whim to be more hospitable for seadwellers, but even ten sweeps spent dipping in and out of the shallow, clear sea to scavenge in the cratered ruins of ancient, submerged human cities couldn't prepare Roxy for the icy cold of the cavernous, unlit vaults where the Condesce has stockpiled her goodies.

The water down here absorbs light fast, muting colors until everything's in shades of subdued, opaque blue and grey. If she curls around and looks down at herself without turning her light around, even her dark skin looks faded and blue-tinged, and her feet seem to disappear into the shadows behind her. Roxy doesn't have the benefit of bioluminescent photophores in the skin of her face like the Condesce would have to help navigate the dim passages, and her divelight only carves a narrow beam through the murk. Between her souped-up rebreather and the alien diving suit that adjusted itself to fit her the first time she tried it on, settling on her and going transparent in some places like a second, living skin, she's ready to explore the vaults for a few more hours - at least until it's time to go scrub off and reassure her personal threshy defense squad that no, she hasn't been assassinated by one of the violetbloods or eaten by a defense kraken. Which is apparently a thing. She hasn't seen one yet, and holy crap she's not looking forward to it.

They don't like her being down here alone. But the thing is? When Roxy inherited the Empire, she also inherited the _Battleship_. She and Dirk didn't know what the heck that meant until they had to barricade themselves in the Condesce's personal war room to outlast an enraged army of trolls trying to avenge their tyrian tyrant, and the walls of the room queried whether the newly anointed Empress Rhoxie would prefer to use the horrific acid spray or the strangling aerial kelp of Ater-22 to ward off the hostile forces. It took them almost a day to locate the non-lethal defense options, and another to persuade the _Battleship_ that please for the love of piss, there's no need to make the non-lethal options _super_ lethal - non-lethal _is_ in fact what Great Empress Ro-Lal wants, kthx. For a defense program not quite advanced enough to count as a full-fledged AI, that thing is _creative_.

Down here in the vault levels, there's a million different traps layered into the rounded walls, some of them almost as old as the Condesce herself was. Roxy's wetsuit doesn't have a buoyancy compensator that she or Dirk could identify on sight, but it seems to adjust naturally so that she doesn't rise up toward the ceiling, which is _also_ riddled with a fuckin' load of traps. The water itself, she has been informed, is in fact a trap. Only the Empress herself can pass through the deep vaults unscathed and safely remove their contents without getting wrecked to shit and back again.

So Roxy is doing the responsible Empress thing and hunting around for something shiny and gold they can sell to make mad bank. The imperial coffers could last centuries with how high the boonbucks are stacked, all of it nominally belonging to Roxy - but the problem with trying to hijack an empire that usually feeds itself by continually conquering planets is that when your hot sauce new Empress tries to drag the war machine to a grinding halt, you still have to pay the bills. And the bribes. And possibly reparations to some of the planets that have enough of a viable population left to rebuild their civilizations once they're free. She can only flash the solid diamond Imperial Credit Card so much before she runs out of credit. Old Condy didn't leave computer records for a lot of the stuff down here, preferring to keep her secrets locked up in her ancient old noodle where no one else could find it, so Roxy has to check herself to see what's what. She can feel the faint current streaming and parting around her, and every so often one of the transparent, colorless jellyfish that drift alongside her will flare with rippling lines of blue and mauve light, casting soft light over Roxy's face before fading back into the dark. If they detected anyone who wasn't in her presence, they'd be all over the poor fuck and wrapping them up in neurotoxin-injecting tentacles before you could say 'mistakes have been made.'

She hip-checks a jelly as she finally reaches the hatch of the next vault, and the enormous, lethal blob burbles away in a flicker of neon blue while Roxy presses a hand to the front panel of the hatch. There's a delay before she feels the metal slide back, and something cold and organic envelops her hand. She wants to stick out her tongue, but the rebreather won't let her - the _Battleship_ runs on a hellish mix of biological, psionic, and mechanical technology that the Condesce and her long-lived cohort of torturengineers mastered over the course of millennia. After seeing (and negotiating with) the helmsman wetware who power the fleet through the stars, Roxy won't let a little hand scan make her squeamish. It takes a little longer for this hatch to recognize Her Imperious Rebellion (title pending until they finish hacking the ship and figure out how to alter the obnoxious troll naming scheme) because these vaults aren't connected to most of the main computer systems, and have to individually process the difference between Roxy's biometrics and the Condesce's. Finally the tendrils release her and withdraw to crank the hatch open with a creak that Roxy feels rippling through the water. The current helpfully eddies her in through the circular hatch that spirals open to admit her, and then cuts off completely, leaving her in still water as the airlock kicks in.

Roxy doesn't know what to expect on the far side of the vault's airlock. The first few vaults were packed with the Condesce's trophies, ranging from a diamond taller than Roxy to a stack of carefully preserved bodies left in the corner because they apparently ran out of space to mount them in the Galleray of Conchquered Aliens. But as Roxy's forays into the deep vaults have gone on, she's found weirder and weirder junk - some of it downright sinister. There are guns she doesn't want to touch, freaky-deaky instruments that sit alone in oversized rooms as though they're too dangerous for anything else to be stored with them, and at least one vault that refused to open for her unless she changed out her wetsuit for a radiation-proof exosuit. Which, uh. Yeah. Not a good time.

And this is the deepest she's been. Heck only knows what's behind door number forty two.

Light strips embedded in the walls come into focus as the water sluices out of the airlock, and Roxy picks heavy, pink-blonde strands of hair out of her face as she shivers and waits for her wetsuit to finish crawling and adjusting to the sudden exposure to air. The inner hatch spirals open just as the transparent sections of the suit along her legs and arms turn an opaque pink, a few shades off from tyrian proper so that they match Roxy's eyes, and the texture shifts so that Roxy stops shivering, suddenly comfortable whilst standing soaking wet at room temperature. (She's srsly 80% sure the wetsuit is alive in some fashion, but the seadwellers just give her haughty/pitying looks whenever she asks dumb questions.) She steps inside, cautious and stepping as lightly as she would while arming a bomb.

Her stomach drops as her first step sinks into a pile of _squish_. Meat and bio-organic wires cover the walls and floor, growing over and around the three vertical tubes arranged in the center of the room. Worse, she recognizes the control panels and monitors growing out of the pulsing tissue, arrayed in sets of three around each cylinder for ease of monitoring the vital signs of whatever's inside. It reminds her horribly of an overgrown helmsman's chamber - but she can't see anyone strung up through the odd, orange-tinted glass of the tubes, and there's no tell-tale crackle of psionics running through the wiring. Whoever or whatever is inside, she can barely make out more than shadows against the glass from here.

\-- tipsyGnostalgic [TG] began pestering timaeusTestified [TT] --  
TG: stri dizzle do u copy?  
TG: think i found somethin, r u ready 4 this?  
TT: Always. Lay it on me.  
TG: this is liek some classic hysterical movie shit  
TG: *historical  
TG: found a buncha these frosted tubes w/ unknown fluids and body shapes inside  
TG: all neon genesis n shit  
TT: Cloning vats, or something else? Please tell me you haven't tried to open them.  
TG: what kind of sburblord do u take me for bro  
TG: *scrublord  
TG: 's if i would crack em open and unleash the ponytial death within :/  
TT: Well, I mean, I know you're smarter than that, but it couldn't hurt to check.  
TT: The last thing we need is you dying down there from some overused historical horror movie trope.  
TG: don’t worry im bein all stealth af  
TG: they have vasc sys monitors going so i thiiink theyer alive in there...  
TG: gonna get a lil closer brb  
TT: Be careful. Please don't let anything loose before Karkat's squad or medical can reach you. Even if we take the maintenance ducts, we'd still have to finish cutting through way too many layers of hull to avoid the water.

She has to brush her hair back out of her face again as she creeps forward - it's getting long and heavy and frizzes something fierce when it's too waterlogged to form curls, and since she's in charge of a ship that's 75% flooded, that means it's almost always puffing out around the sides of her face in a pink wall of fuzzy waves. If she can reach one of the monitoring panels, she should be able to pull up information on what Condy stuck in these tubes and figure out where to go from there. The helm-like setup gives her the sinking feeling that people are _alive_ in here, and have presumably been chilling out for the past year while Roxy and Dirk dicked around with the Empire at large. Life support and stasis should probably still be running just fine, since the vaults are all on their own isolated circuit, but all it would take is one rotten wire and someone could have been cooked in their 'coon.

...That _is_ weird, though. Huh. Roxy frowns around the room as she tiptoes up to the first monitor, and then gives the frosted glass of the tube nearest her another once-over. Mostly trolls rely on the organic systems, like how they sleep in recooperacoons grown out of the ceilings. Most of it's based on native stuff on their original planet and genetically modified to best suit their biology. These glass tubes don't jive with a normal helmsman chamber. Roxy marks that down as evidence that what's here _isn't_ a trio of troll descendants being held hostage against the good behavior of their ancestors (that was the mess they had to unravel way back in vault number 4), and then taps on the screen to get it to pay attention to her. If need be she can hack the shit out of it, but the majority of the Condesce's computer security protocols swapped over to acknowledge Roxy the second she inherited the Empire, and she doesn't complain.

There's just one problem. The screen blinks at her, Alternian script flowing out right to left in golden text as it recognizes her fingerprint - and the tube _hisses_. Startled, Roxy ducks behind the monitoring station before she finishes processing the fact that fluid is audibly draining, and the glass has begun to split and slide back up into the organic matter joining the tube to the vault ceiling.

TG: uh oh  
TT: What.  
TG: uhhhhhhh  
TT: Rox. What's happening down there?  
TG: rememeber that whole do not open the tubes plan  
TG: it was on auto :(  
TT: Do you need an evac?  
TG: think it's keyed to the empress thing so i should be safe  
TG: probs  
TT: 'Probs' has variable definitions. I would prefer to hear a 'totes'  
TG: lemme get my detective on first  
TG: def send medical through the maintenance ducts, idek what shape these guys will be in  
TT: Dispatched.

At least it's only the one. Roxy eyes the other two suspiciously quiescent tubes before turning her full attention to the one that's opening. Once the orange solution drains away, the open shell of the tube appears to be coated in...purplish black ooze. Oh shit, they rotted. Someone - someone has to clean that up, the way they cleaned up what was left of that poor burgundyblood helmsman who _melted_ helping them outrun the bulk of the war fleet, and Roxy doesn't know whether cleaning it up herself would make her more nauseous than if she let the much aggrieved cleaning brigade handle it. The ooze slumps mostly against one side of the glass casing and Roxy gulps hard as she picks out the general outline of what might have been an arm, an unkempt bob of dead white hair hanging low over what used to be a face - no horns, which means the poor thing def wasn't a troll, and -

With a thin rattle, the thing lifts its head, cocks it to the side, and contemplates Roxy with burning, pupilless eyes. Everything but the hair and those eyes is swathed in shifting veils of shadow that the lights overhead can't pierce. Like a bad texture glitch in a classic video game - like reality can't quite render right amidst all that horrible ooze.

Roxy's mouth pops open, but nothing comes out.

The creature watches her, eyes glittering and unreadable, and when it speaks, salt water streams out between its lips.

W̅e̎ͪľ͛ͣ̎͗̓lͤ̇̆̈́̚.ͣ Hėl̈́ͮ̆̄lͩͦͨͩͤ̈oͣ̏̈́,͂ ͨͭ͐͑͗t͋̍̑ͪ̋̽̏h̅͒̓ͨe͌ͫͩ̚nͮ͗̾ͦ̏̈,̐ͭͦ̆̍ͨ ̏Eͤmpͦ̊ͭͩr̔ĕͣ͛̍ͯ̓sͨͥ̌͛ͥs̍.͂ͣ̂̚ Ĥ̅̌̽̐͗̚õ͐̐̏w͋͗ͥ͑ͣ ͛ͩͩ̈́͆̊m͋a͒̍y̌ wͯͥ̓̌͌eͧ̽̌ ̌s͛̿̆̿̏̓e̐ͧ̓r͂͗̈́̅v̽ͧ̓ͫͧ̑e͂ ̆̈́ÿõũ?̇ͯ

Roxy keels right over with a _hrkgh_. Something in the overlapping, echoing voices strikes exactly the wrong note and hits her like an aneurysm. She can feel the shoulders of her wetsuit crawling up and stretching along her neck in a frantic scramble to cover her ears, but it's just a little too late. Her vision fades in and out after her head smacks into flesh of the floor with a sticky sound, and she curls up in the fetal position and covers her own damn ears before she passes out.

The last thing she sees is a thin, bipedal form lifting itself up from the brackish ooze and stepping over the inner rim of the tube toward her.

Dirk and Head Threshy Karkat are gonna be _super_ pissed.

\---

She wakes up at a table set for tea.

This is marginally less weird than that one time she tried deep sea absinthe to chase an entire bottle of vodka and wound up hallucinating right through a surreal video chat with Dirk, but only just. Groaning, she blinks at the lacy fabric spread out right in front of her nose, and then lifts her head off the table with the ginger caution of someone used to drinking through the hangovers until nausea passes. The spot where her forehead rested on the table aches, and it takes her a full minute of blinking before the rest of the table shifts into focus. A full spread of tiny biscuits and cookies covered in sparkling sugar, tiny sandwiches with thin slices of something green in the middle, and a tea set that alternates between black cups with silver filigree and pastel lavender and pink china on neat saucers sits before her.

The girl sitting opposite her takes yet another minute to focus on. Roxy catches herself squinting to make the other person stop wavering at the edges, but by then she's not sure how long she's been sitting here, swaying in her seat and glaring at a total stranger. She'd apologize or something - usually Dirk's the one who doesn't know when to stop staring, because he thinks his shades let him get away with everything - but frankly, she expected to wake up either on the gross-ass floor or in the Empress's private medical ward or not at all, so she's not sure what to make of all this. They're still in the overgrown vault. But now there's a friggin' _adorable_ tea set and a neat, elegant table right in the middle of the trio of stasis tubes, and Roxy has no clue how someone managed to haul this in here while she was unconscious.

Also, it's been a while since she's seen a human who wasn't Dirk. And this girl _is_ recognizably human. Her skin is dark, a much cooler brown than Roxy's, and her hair is a shock of white with no sign of the original color growing in at the roots, like Roxy always has to deal with when the pink grows out. She appears to be in her indeterminate twenties, just like Roxy, but that - can't be right. Earth's native population by 2400 was pretty much numbered in the not-high-enough, and people Roxy's age are a rare commodity.

"You must have questions," the girl says, matter of fact and in perfect formal late Earth lang, and she lifts the pot to pour steaming, dark purple tea into each of their cups. It stains the sides of the cup in front of Roxy's sleep spot with a raspberry red tinge, and Roxy rubs the underside of her left eye as if that will help this make more sense. "My noble contacts convey their deepest apologies - they hadn't anticipated that Her Imperious Condescension's successor would not be of the same species, and forgot that they would need to adjust their choruses and echolocution accordingly. I believe my own voice should suffice, in this case. A most fortunate turn of events."

"Yeah, what the shit _was_ that?" Roxy blurts out in Alternian. It's Imperial standard - heck, she and Dirk only know late Earth talk because of old Internet archives. She can't even imagine stringing together so many full, fluent sentences together like this girl does, not without Troll Google Translate on hand. "Who even are you? Wait - were you the one covered in goop?!" She has very distinct memories of getting laid out by an ominously goopy figure. There's no sign of the shadowy ooze anywhere on this human girl - in fact, she's dressed up in something that is _so_ classic Earth: all different shades of purple and gold and black, with poofy sleeves and a long, slit purple skirt, and a corset with no symbol anywhere to be seen in the silhouette. It's...really weird!

"Yes, that was me. I trust that this is slightly more appropriate attire," the girl says. Roxy definitely hears a faint, wry note in her voice as she gestures to her snazzy outfit. "I'll admit, my grasp of current Earth fashion has been out of date for some time now."

Roxy blinks, processing the weird pronunciation, and then pounces on 'Earth.' "You _are_ human!" she says, excitement bubbling up as she smacks a palm down on the table. The girl looks startled, then nods, bemused. "Fffffffholy shit, how long have you been stuck down here? Because, like, if this was some hostage situation thingy, I promise we're returning peeps as fast as we find them," she adds, hastily. She twirls her finger in a circle to encompass most of the room, her other hand already bringing the tea up to her mouth for investigation. Wait. Shit. No, no drinking the mysterious tea. Curse her instant reflex to drink things.

The girl purses her lips with a faint frown. Her pale, pale eyes stick to Roxy while her hands move to spoon a tiny heap of sugar into her own cup. Apparently she knows the layout of the table well enough that she doesn't need to look to see what she's doing, which Roxy thinks would be handy as shit - her hands still get the shakes even when she's not contemporizing - contemplating the merits of _just one drink, it couldn't hurt_. "I take it the succession of power was as bloody and fatal and lacking in any kind of explanations as the Condesce would have demanded, then."

Roxy shrugs. "Yeah, pretty much."

Nodding, the girl sighs. "Well, if you know nothing about us, allow me to make the introductions. I am the Emissary of the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors, at your service." She dips her head, and Roxy mirrors the motion without thinking. "Any inquiries you may wish to make of them can be directed through me, and one of them may answer - depending on their mood." After a moment, the girl taps a finger to her purple lips, pursing them, before looking at Roxy with an absorbed, unreadable expression. "You may call me Rose, if it suits you."

Roxy sets her cup of untouched tea down on the table with a thump that misses the saucer entirely, nodding awkwardly and raising a hand. About two seconds too late, she recollects that she has no idea who this person actually is and that shaking hands might be a dumb thing to do, and lifts her hand further for an awkward wave. So smooth. "Rose," she says, marveling at how short and soft the name sounds in her best attempt at an old Earth accent. "Cool. I'm Rhoxie. Er, Her Imperious Rebellion. Or Her Imperious Rox, for short, or heck, just Roxy." Then, after a pause - "I have absolutely no idea what any of the rest of that meant. Horror what-now?" She's pretty sure anything starting with 'horror' and ending in 'terror' is gonna be bad news, but she plasters a wide smile on to be safe.

Rose nods again, as if she expected the question. "Horrorterrors. The outer gods. Their tangled, contradictory agendas are like as unto a riddle wrapped inside an enigma wrapped inside a tentacle, even to representatives such as myself. However, they have expressed a vested interest in the fortunes of the Empire, regardless of what mortal entity currently rules it, and thus extend their pact of cooperation with Her Imperious Condescension on to her inheritor." She sighs, shakes her head, and takes another sip of her tea. "Alas, their last emissary was one of their own given form on the physical plane and threatened to unleash indiscriminate, galactic genocide with each gurgle of its belly, and so the Condescension slew it along with her latest blood descendent in order to ensure the security of the Empire."

Roxy has heard tell of the last Heiress, as it so happens - the upper crusty trolls like to sneer over their salty beverages and make suuuper subtle comments about how easily the Condesce forked poor Feferi Peixes and carved the young descendant's horns into yet another coiling bangle to add to rest of her bling. The clowny douche council showed off the special mural they did with stolen fuchsia blood in their mass torture chamber, because for some weird reason they really like Roxy and wanted to impress her in their creepy juggalo way, before requesting if maybe possibly they could get another paint can full of Condy. RIP in pieces, Peixes. "...And your circlular dudes were okay with her doing that?" she asks.

Rose shrugs bonelessly, her pale eyes cast down to observe her tea as she ladles still more sugar in. Roxy is starting to get her srs thinking hat on, and wondering _exactly_ where all this tea stuff came from. "The loss of one physical body is inconsequential to them. They simply engaged a new emissary: one more...controlled." She smiles crookedly. "So never fear - I unleash genocide only on a planetary scale, and only at your behest, my Empress."

Oh _shit_ , she just threw down the g-word. It sits between them like the verbal equivalent of a rotten aftertaste, souring the dreamlike, unreal atmosphere and reminding Roxy that she has _no_ clue who she's sitting across from.

And not knowing could get her royally _fucked_.

"Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa." Roxy makes a T with her hands, praying that Rose won't notice the tremor in her fingers. "H-hold up. I gotta take a call." This is entirely true and accurate and totally not just an excuse to look away from Rose's horrifyingly polite smile; her wrist-mounted cat communicator has been purring away for pretty much this entire conversation, and her wetsuit peels back in relief as she pokes at it to uncover the screen.

She can't break eye contact with Rose, though, doesn't dare to even breathe funny, and all the air gusts out of her in a sigh of relief when Rose inclines her head, eyes falling shut. The natural, upward curve at the corners of the girl's eyes is enhanced by flawless black liner and shimmery maroon and gold eyeshadow. "By all means," Rose says, and then proceeds to occupy herself with a long sip of sugary tea. Roxy whips the communicator up to her face so she can pretend there's nothing to see in the room but the chat.

TG: dirk  
TG: we got a fuckin sitch in here  
CG: WHY IF IT ISN'T YOUR IMPERIOUS GO FUCK YOURSELF. IF YOU'RE NOT DEAD IN THERE ALREADY I'M GOING TO THROTTLE YOU MYSELF SO HELP ME FUCKING -  
TG: o shit karkat whats up  
CG: OH, I DON'T KNOW, NOTHING MUCH IN PARTICULAR, JUST _THE FUCKING EMPRESS GOING AWOL, YOU FU-_  
TT: What is your status, Roxy?  
TG: im awaek and fine as foxes  
TG: the roxiest of foxies ;)  
CG: SHE'S DELIRIOUS. FUCK.  
TT: No, this is within her normal stress response parameters, according to my calculations. But I could still use a larger sample size.  
TG: ho no, wendigo dirk put you on, hal meister?  
TG: *when did  
TT: That is Auto-Responder Hal to you until you have sufficiently demonstrated your faculties are your own.  
CG: YOUR FREAKY HUMAN PLATONIC CONSORT HAS BEEN TRYING TO CHOP HIS WAY THROUGH THIS DOOR FOR THE PAST FIFTEEN MINUTES. WE GOT PAST THE OUTER HATCH, BUT THERE'S SOME RANCID FUCKING SLIME WALL AND IT KEEPS WIPING THE FLOOR WITH OUR POSTERIERS DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT'S A WALL AND IT HASN'T FUCKING MOVED SINCE WE GOT HERE.  
CG: THIS IS A FUCKING TRAVESTY OF A RESCUE OPERATION, AND I AM NOT HAPPY, RHOXIE.  
CG: NOT. HAPPY.  
TG: uh oh  
TG: hey u wouldnt by any perchance happen to know anyhting about a horrorteror lady who can blow up plants  
CG: ...NO.  
TG: *planets sry  
CG: OH BLOOD SHITTING FUCK TELL ME YOU HAVEN'T FOUND THE ANNIHILATION SQUAD.  
CG: GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE.  
CG: HURRY.

Easier said than done. Roxy has a sneaking suspicion that slime wall probably came from the same place as Rose's old goopsuit, though, and like heck is she gonna risk antagonizing the deceptively normal-looking human when she just confessed to _magical genocide powers_. Roxy may not like a good half of the assholes on the _Battleship_ , but no way does she want to see the whole ship get genocided on. Her smile is a heckuva a lot more forced as she smoothes the wetsuit back down over the catmunnicator, her movements jerky as she fights the instinct to bolt for the exit. "So, uh...annihilation squad?" she says with a high, jittery, nervous laugh.

Rose has almost finished her cup of tea; her purple lipstick now has a dark crimson tint. She seems unconcerned by the crack in Roxy's voice as she sets the cup down on the saucer and picks up a cuc sandwich to get her nibbles on. "Indeed. Consider us your personal weapons of mass destruction," she says, with the faintest note of irony in her voice. She scoops up the plate of sandwiches with slim fingers and offers it to Roxy.

Oh, triple shit. Roxy was really, really hoping the other two stasis tubes in the room would turn out to be spares. And also that she wouldn't get called out on not laying a finger on any of the finger food. So much for that. She takes a thin sandwich and crosses the fingers of her other hand, so she remembers not to eat it by accident. "So there's - more than one of you, and all that?" she says, striving for casual and coming up short. Wayyy short. One lady with the hypothetical power to kill planets full of people is bad enough...

Rose shatters the last of her hopes and dreams, standing up from the table with a sweeping curtsey. "Of course. Allow me to introduce you." Her skirt swings out behind her, exposing black tights that run all the way up her legs as she gestures toward the other two frosted glass tubes.

Roxy scrambles to her feet, the sandwich wholly forgotten. Sitting while Rose is standing feels unsafe. Roxy's already off-balance in this conversation because Rose has such a firm handle on the weirdness crank, and she has to force herself not to panic. "Shitfuck - I mean, no need to wake them up right away or anything, right? Ha...ha?" she says, her voice higher than she's ever heard it go before. If she listens carefully, she can hear the dull, distant, squelchy sound of something thudding on the far side of the vault door behind her - it does _not_ sound like Dirk and Threshy Karkat are making any headway against whatever slimey stuff has gunked up the only exit.

Which means Roxy has to stay on Rose's good side. Talk her into opening the door. She just has to...not freak out. After all these months grinning her way through negotiations with disapproving coldblood nobles and unsettled warmblood troops, she should have her fancy-schmancy Empress face down to a friggin' science by now. And yet...

Somehow, Roxy has already said something wrong. Roxy isn't sure what, but Rose's shoulders stiffen, and her voice makes the temperature in the room drop about twenty degrees in an uncomfortably literal way. "That is, of course, entirely your decision," she says, cold, before sweeping over toward the nearest set of monitors.

Roxy doesn't know if any of the other tube thingies are automated. She stumbles around the table on unsteady feet and then pelts forward to catch up with Rose. Hastily inserting herself between the girl and the vital system monitors takes some serious maneuvers, but she does it with another loud, nervous laugh. She's braced for a fight, but Rose doesn't try to push past - she folds her hands in front of her and observes Roxy with a knowing look in her eye. It's a little weird, to register that Rose is actually almost half a foot shorter than her; girl's got presence. "About the door -" Roxy tries.

"Sealed, for your safety while you were unconscious," Rose says, still chill as icepops. "If you wish, I can allow whoever has been so persistent out there to enter, but I cannot promise that they would be safe if the other two members are released without the proper precautions."

Roxy opens her mouth - _let them in right now, please and thank -_ then snaps it shut, gnawing on her lip as she thinks it over. "Precautions?" she asks.

Rose's eyes slant toward the tubes. "They may not recognize you at first. Your grasp on reality tends to loosen after extended periods in stasis, and given the Condesce didn't intend to relinquish her hold on the Empire, the two of them have not received any prior instruction as to how to respond to this transition. Until the transfer of power is confirmed, they could lash out at perceived threats. I would protect you, of course, but there would still be a significant risk to anyone else in the vicinity."

Way too late, Roxy realizes she's smushed the little cucumber sandwich in her hand; there's squashed bread and cucumber slices slowly dropping onto the floor. Biowires can compost pretty well, but it's still not a good impression to be making, here. Plus there's nowhere for her to ditch the remaining sandwich, so she's stuck holding it cupped in her closed hand so Rose can't see. "...Then lesdo introductions first," Roxy says, to buy more time. Dirk's gonna be stoically pissy for the rest of the day regardless, so she might as well see who or what she's dealing with here before getting Rose to unseal the door. She'd worry about Karkat's blood pressure, but he's threatened to keel over from a rage-induced heart attack and/or quit with extreme prejudice often enough in the past year that she thinks he's just melodramatic that way. She's pretty sure he's been top threshecutioner longer than she or Dirk have been alive, so he can't be _that_ weak. "Give me the itinerary, the who's who. Lay it on me."

Rose is at the console before Roxy can blink. It's twice as unsettling as when Dirk pulls that kind of crap, because Roxy doesn’t have time to scream _no_ before Rose has tapped something on the monitor. Oh crap, Roxy's such a chump. How does she get herself into these messes.

To her huge relief, the stasis tube doesn't slide open. Instead, the opaque, frosted glass turns translucent, so that the being within slides into sharp focus.

And ohhh jeez, Roxy is starting to see a trend here. The girl drifting in the second tube was almost _definitely_ human shaped, at some point, just like Rose. Both of them must've gotten picked up from Earth for some bullshit reason and tossed into the WMD stew. But someone spliced this girl with something decidedly not-human - Roxy's not up to snuff when it comes to identifying her pre-drowning mammals, but dogs and wolves turn up often enough in old media along with the extant cats for her to get the gist based on the ears and the bushy tail. Her skin's close to troll grey, her lips a raspberry-black bruise, but in places the greyish tinge gives way to large patches of dark, swirling green light. Even in induced stasis, her face curls in a horrible grimace, teeth bared, and her claws spasm in a way that makes Roxy's hands give a sympathy twinge. Organic life support cables and tubes bundle at her back and wrap around to feed into her wrists and neck and sides; Roxy is ten kinds of concerned about the fact that she can't tell if they've started to grow through her or not, which could cause capital-p Problems.

"The Rampager," Rose murmurs, in Alternian. The title reverberates in the air, like there's more than one voice talking over Rose's, and Roxy shifts her weight from one foot to the other, bouncing a little and throwing the vault door a wistful look. "She is capable of manipulating space in order to teleport, enhance her strength, and disrupt gravity within a certain radius. Thanks to the assistance of my employers, her powers have been amplified, so that she is capable of splitting atoms. Her temperament makes her less than suitable for any mission wherein you might desire to spare some of the population or keep large portions of the planet in question intact and suitable for future cultivation. She has reduced small terrestrial planetoids to dust, in the past. She should be conditioned enough to heel at your command, but in the event she goes out of control, the previous Empress installed failsafe mechanisms within her mind. I believe you have access to the bio-organic implants by virtue of being Empress, though it may be limited if you don't possess innate psychic abilities of your own."

Roxy does _not_ want to know what that means. It sounds like mind control, which is ten different kinds of _hell nah_ almost on the same level as the g-word. Psychics make up a considerably larger proportion of the troll race than they ever did humanity, and Condy's ability to curbstomp the stronger ceruleanbloods and purplebloods into obedience was always a seriously relevant question. The queasiness roiling through Roxy's insides isn't going to go away anytime soon, at this rate. "Oh, fuck. Oh man. Does she have a name? Like, a normal name, like you?" A human name, she means but doesn't say, one that doesn't fit into the six- and eight-cadences and clicks of Alternian and screws up all the declension endings unless you force in extra junk syllables.

The question hits Rose's pause button for a fraction of a second; her lips move without sound before she speaks. "...She used to be called Jade. She doesn't remember much beyond that, though."

 _Jade_. It's as short as Rose, but rolls less. Roxy tries to fit it to the face of the flickering hybrid girl twitching her way through stasis nightmares in the tank. But Rose strides away without warning and heads right for the last tube, and Roxy has to rush after her. She clears the glass with a touch of the monitor while Roxy's still struggling not to trip over her own feet. "Right. And - her?" Roxy asks, stumbling one last time and catching herself on the side of the console. After making sure her fingers haven't swept over anything important, she looks up at the last person - then does a double take. "Fuck, were all y'all -"

It's another human. Three for three. This last girl is even more visibly human than Jade, and Roxy's heart lurches sideways when she catches the dead-white pallor of her face and hands. Rose seems unperturbed by the lack of pigmentation when Roxy shoots a nervous look her way, so maybe it's normal?

But. Three humans. Roxy feels like she went shopping for a nice bushel of troll-shaped apples and found three humany chili peppers snuggled in the bottom of the cart like a trio of sneaky snugglers. "Ne'er mind, I'm just thinking out loud," she says, when she realizes Rose is patiently waiting for her to finish her sentence.

Rose offers the Earth-accented name without prompting. "The Sentinel. Her name is Jane."

Rose is in cool classical Earth clothes and Jade has grey and black with green for her swirling symbol, which is pretty much enforced troll fashion for their kiddos before they hit adult pupation. Jane wears a harsh cherry red over black leggings, the color of human blood and damaged troll tissue. Trolls wear off-spectrum red for defiance or danger; the Condesce used it for all her deadliest weapons, including the _Battleship_ itself. Roxy doesn't know how to take it in this case. This last girl's chunky, ink black hair is cropped closer than Rose's, and her nose appears to have been broken and reset multiple times. But there's something else weird about her face - there's just enough tint left in the stasis fluid that she can't quite see -

Roxy steps closer, darting a quick look at the monitor and mentally daring it to pull some automated horseshit. She leans in, squinting through the glass, and her breath leaves a faint cloud that she has to wipe away with the side of her hand. Inside, she can just barely make out red and black lines etched around the pale girl's face - tattoos? It's too hard to tell.

Her voice falling into a practiced rhythm, Rose goes on. "Her range is shorter than Jade's, and she has no superhuman offensive capabilities the likes of which Jade and I may bring to bear. However, her self-regenerative abilities have no equal - the Condesce tested this extensively - and her techno-organic enhancements speed her reflexes and almost eliminate the need for sleep. While she could theoretically clear a city through sheer determination, it would most likely be simpler and more efficient to delegate such tasks to myself or Jade." Rose tilts her head to the side; she's close enough on Roxy's right side that Roxy can almost feel the strands brushing her shoulder, light as a crawling spider. Roxy flexes one hand, not daring to touch the glass again. "She served the Condesce primarily as a bodyguard; she can also take care of the individual, discreet disposal of anyone you designate as a high priority threat to the Empire."

Assassin/bodyguard is a little less intimidating to have on someone's resume than 'can blow up small planets' when it comes across one's metaphorical desk, and Roxy is _not_ complaining. "Your, uh, your horrible wiggly guys didn't do anything to her?" she asks, trying for casual. Pfft. As if she actually knows what she's talking about. Fake it til you make it, that's her motto.

"Nothing - the Condesce deemed it preferable to restrict grimdark experimentation to Jade, while using Jane to test how a human could be enhanced with untainted Alternian tech," Rose says, with a small, indifferent shrug. "She disliked the notion of relying entirely on the Noble Circle when it came to the most powerful, experimental weapons in her arsenal, and wished to have something she alone could control. Smart of her, really."

Her skin crawls. Sucking in a breath to steady herself, Roxy pushes back from the glass. "Alrighty then. Well, that's all prrretty much as sad and messed up as I thought it would be." Another breath. "If I let 'em out, they'll listen to me?"

"Yes. You may release them at your discretion; the decision is entirely yours." Rose lingers over the pause. "But."

Roxy likes butts, not buts. Especially not buts in situations like these. Having weaponized humans in her newly-inherited hoard of riches isn't a situation she's encountered before, but it's kind of a common sense thing. "Oh, frick. But what?" she asks.

With a moue that purses her lips, Rose clasps her hands behind her back and starts to pace around behind Roxy, the back half of her skirt dancing a little in ways that the minimal air flow in the room can't account for. Roxy pivots on one foot to keep the girl in sight. "Am I correct in guessing that your position as Empress is somewhat...precarious?" Rose asks, delicately. "Beset on all sides by Alternian nobles hostile to the concept of an alien as ruler of their Empire? Struggling to maintain a grip on the warmer bloods who see this as an opportunity to agitate for their own right to self-determination? Concerned about the future viability of this vast war machine of an Empire you have inherited? Are you, to wit - 'royally fucked?'"

Roxy knows a sales pitch when she hears one. "I mean, like, things aren't _bad_ bad..." she says, after another steadying breath that whistles right back out her nose. "But I have to level with you - I'm not really the kinda Imperiousness who does stuff like annihilation. And genocide. And stuff." She said stuff already. Shit.

"Oh, I _see_. Yet, your situation is less than ideal." Rose stops pacing and turns to smile at Roxy, the motion unnaturally smooth, her eyes dancing a little with something too sharp to be laughter. "Having us by your side may - alleviate that pressure somewhat."

For anyone with a lick of ambition, Roxy gets the feeling that this would be a hellsa tempting sales pitch. If she were the sort of person who liked the idea of power, or intimidating others with a handy-dandy death squad at her beck and call. The Condesce was _definitely_ that kind of person: crafty and ancient as an alien ocean and eager to keep the castes of her Empire in line with terror and the promise of glory in conquest to sweeten the sodden, sea salt pie.

Except Roxy's not at all that kind of person. The idea of ordering these three to make Overseer Kygnathe crap his pants and stop hecking up the financials squicks her out to no end. It would also mess up all of Terezi's plans re: making Overseer Kygnathe crap his pants, etc., and the last thing Roxy needs is to piss off her damn lawyer.

If she knows the Condesce, none of these three had any choice in being turned into...this, and then getting locked up in the basement to be Condy's boogeymen. Ordering them to menace people would be horrible. Leaving them down here to rot would be equally horrible. Whatever else has been done to them, whatever the Condesce has had them do, they're still _people_.

After a moment of thinking some really strongly worded thoughts, Roxy holds up a finger. "I need to take another call."

TG: diiiirrk?  
TG: imma do something that's maybe a little dumb  
TT: How 'dumb' are we talking about, here? Do I need to get the actual Dirk back on the line so I can avoid being sideswiped by accountability for your corporeal shenanigans?  
CG: WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THERE, DAMMIT?  
TG: these squad ladies will probabely recognize me as their babe empress and be chill but  
TG: i dont wanna risk other peeps gettin caught in the crosshatch b4 they simmer down  
TG: *cross stitch  
TG: **crossfire hot damn  
CG: DO. FUCKING. NOT. DO. _***THE THING***._  
TG: srry karkat, we cant just let them stay cooped in here 4ever ;(  
CG: OH YES YOU CAN! THAT IS, IN FACT, THE 100% SMARTEST AND MOST REASONABLE COURSE OF ACTION WHEN DEALING WITH PEOPLE WHO ARE LITERALLY CALLED THE ANNIHILATION SQUAD!!! THEY HAVE FOUR CENTURIES OF UTTER FUCKERY UNDER THEIR BELTS, WHICH IS ACTUALLY A SIGNIFICANT LENGTH OF TIME FOR PEOPLE WHO AREN'T OVERSALTED FUCKHEADS. PLEASE GROW A FUCKING SENSE OF SELF-PRESERVATION!  
TG: loads of ancient human classics full of holy disney wisdom would say otherwise  
TG: the answer is clearly to mako friends w/ them and ??? Profit  
TG: you said 4 centuries which mean s they are _totally_ vintage human  
CG: UNBE-FUCKING-LIEVABLE. NO, REALLY, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU JUST FORCED ME TO READ THAT DRIVEL WITH MY OWN TWO GANDERBULBS.  
TG: hal get durkalurkin in here to back me up with his sweet ancient human film critical theory skills  
TT: Yeah, I'm not getting nailed to the firewall for this one. I am so not qualified for this. Transferring...  
TT: Roxy, what the actual fuck?  
TG: xplain disney theory 2 karkat. birb! again!

Roxy looks up from her communicator, feeling just the slightest bit fuzzy around the edges. Her brain, in contrast, feels like it's running at warp speed, the kind of rushing, dizzy focus that happens when she's on the verge of something she can't afford to fuck up. Like when she and Dirk met IRL for the first time, after ages and ages of only talking over the ancient messaging system they'd both hacked into using their own methods, and she had to shove past the instinctive alarm of meeting someone new to bound up to him in a sharp, paradoxical haze.

She meets Rose's eyes dead on, and jams a finger toward her own face. "See this? This is my serious Empress Ro-Ro face," she says. She does not actually know what her serious Empress face looks like, since all her attempts at practicing in the mirror tend to dissolve into silliness. Rose straightens, her chin rising to attention as she narrows her eyes and all at once, Roxy gets the distinct impression that she's being _watched_ ; a quick check shows that Jade and Jane are still dead to the world from the neck up. But when she looks back at Rose, unnerved, there's something...off. The other girl's eyes burn with just a touch of that uncanny light from earlier - and Roxy didn't really want a mysterious old elder god audience, but it looks like she's getting one. She swallows. "If we wake these other two up, you all can't, uh. Can't run around and blow stuff up. Please. Because it's cool, I get it, it seems like Condy really screwed you guys over like she did everyone she could get her claws on, pretty much."

Her hand closes into a fist by her side, tight enough that the muscle starts to cramp. Roxy looks down, and then lets it relax. 'Cause she's not here to fight. "I'm just _really_ not a genocide-y kind of Empress," she repeats, feeling the buzzy hum in her head subside into something more mellow as she breathes. "I don't want to let errybody out of their nap tubs and order you guys to scare people and stuff, I just want to let you out so you can...live."

Rose stares at her, eyes pupilless and glowing and unblinking. Roxy half-expects the response to come out as horrorspeech that will make her ears try to crawl into her skull again. But instead Rose closes her eyes, and opens them, pale lavender and not at all full of the echoes of creepy crawly gods. "Really. You're being serious," she says, voice hard and flat.

It's the flat skepticism that sets her off. "It's true!" Roxy says, jerking her chin up to match Rose's and folding her arms. "And also I'm looking to make this whole Empire business a lot less skeevy and enslave-y and murder-y. I'm never gonna order you guys to go annihilate stuff. Or people. So if you all can be superpowered but also _not_ kill people for the foreseeable future, that would be phenolphthalein." Agh, _dammit_. Right at the critical moment! "Phenomenal, I mean," she finishes, on a weaker note. Then, quieter still: "We're just trying to make things...less awful. For as many peeps as we can."

Rose takes half a step back. For a second, Roxy thinks she looks...lost. "I - suppose that could be arranged. We are at your command, after all," she says, but it sounds like rote phrases, lined up for Roxy to hear because Rose is busy frantically picking up what Roxy just laid down. "We strike only when and where you will it. If you are concerned about Jade and Jane's destructive tendencies between excursions, rest assured that I can handle them. We three have a rapport." By the end the girl's carefully folded hands have knotted themselves into the fabric of her skirt.

Roxy wants to say they don't have to be at her command; but she lost any sense of how to mentally work around that the sec she became Empress. So instead she grins so hard that her jaw twinges in protest. "Great! Awesome! So, uh. Who do we start with?" she asks, unfolding her arms. Might as well ride this high of important decision-making all the way to the end!

Looking like she's in a daze of her own, Rose smooths her skirt back out and points to the nearest stasis chamber, one hand clasped close to her chest in an oddly vulnerable curl. "Jane should be marginally more restrained in her initial response. And seeing that both she and I acknowledge you may ease the transition for Jade, in turn."

Her wrist buzzes at her angrily. Roxy ignores it. Time to stare into the void, and hope whatever's in the void blinks first. She cracks her knuckles, and nods. "Kay. Janey first. Bring it on."

\---

Rose tries to feed her a line about how the stasis tube controls only open to Roxy's touch; supposedly, Rose can skim through the information on the monitors, but can't trigger the startup sequence. Kinda like how the custodial crew had to kidnap Roxy and drag her down to the helmstrata of the ship to open the core lightspeed engine chamber with a dramatic wave of her hand, because the Condesce had restricted access to the Psiioniic and no one could get in to check if he was even still alive without Roxy's badass admin powers.

(Psii still won't talk to anyone except Sollux, but Roxy can tell he's miffed that she unintentionally made 'open sesameme' the new password for his block. You don't last countless hundreds of sweeps with most of your body sown into the organic matter of the walls and floor without having _standards_ to keep you bitterly, spitefully alive _._ Setting him free from the independent action inhibitors nearly lost her the custodians' support, but won her the helmstrata. As the helmsmen haven't yet taken advantage of their new collective autonomy to launch them all ship-first into the nearest black hole, Roxy wins. Obviously.)

But Roxy takes one canny as fuck look at Rose's carefully composed lips and calm eyes, and suspects that's just a convenient way of implying that Rose would use her googly-moogly horror powers to circumvent the console entirely. Maaybe that's a little paranoid, but also she's got little to no idea what the limits of Rose's elder god emissary powers are beyond genocide, so.

Roxy's in it to win it now, though. So she slams her whole palm flat on the screen for dramatic effect, and feels kind of put out when it just makes a _bonk_ sound. She turns to watch as the tank begins to hiss and drain, and the girl within slumps. Unlike Rose, who had her tasty horror slime bath to lounge in, the life support cables relax so that Jane can set her feet on the floor, then pump a cocktail of chemicals and electric impulses in to wake her up as the rest of the cables retract into the ceiling of the chamber.

To Roxy's intense relief, nothing appears to have been absorbed by life support: helmsmen trolls are _too_ compatible with the bio-organic systems in chambers like these, and the life support chassis usually swallows and incorporates them into the structure as part of its gross natural progression. The _Battleship_ has psionics grown into the meat of the entire helmstrata, most of them long past the point when their original bodies would have given out, their minds more code and patches than anything sentient. Sollux is always brutally pragmatic and resigned about the chances that some of the older engines can be extracted from their symbiotic chambers, even if Engineer Zahhak and her near-descendant figure out how to achieve non-psionic lightspeed.

Jane sloshes in knee-deep fluid and then jerks upright, suddenly aware. Her hair slicks down over her forehead, tiny orange droplets sluicing down over her eyes and cheeks as she shakes her head. The last of the fluid gets sucked away so that the tube can fold open, and Roxy's chest tightens as she sees the red and black circuitry threaded into the wet skin of Jane's face. The lines stand out the most where the skin thins around her closed eyes, but the overall lack of pigmentation means that she can trace circuits almost everywhere. Some of the final wires to peel off her skin appear to have been plugged into the circuitry extending down the skin of her forearms and shins. The girl sways and raises a hand to touch her forehead, and Roxy starts to edge closer because it looks kinda like she's about to keel over. Rose clears her throat, but Roxy's already reaching to help steady Jane before she can rethink her life choices.

Without warning, the girl's eyelids twitch open, revealing inky black sclera. Roxy chokes back a yell, but it's too late. Jane's glaring red irises rotate unnaturally and fixate on Roxy - she can't tell if the effect comes from enhanced contact lenses or something embedded in the eyes themselves. Then a paper-white hand shoots out and latches onto Roxy's neck like a vice, lifting her up onto her toes as Jane steps forward over the threshold.

Well, it was a good run as Great Empress Ro-lal. No, really, Roxy didn't expect to make it past the first week! 'Choked out by someone from the raptly - no, aptly-named annihilation squad' sounds better for the history 'feeds than 'stabbed by accident when a klutzy human tripped over her own feet mid-fight.' Roxy scrabbles at the unyielding hand, her fingernails dragging and digging into Jane's skin as she tries to pry her grip loose. A curling strand of hair falls down in front of her eye at the worst possible moment, so she has to bare her teeth in one last grimace with half her view of Jane obscured by itchy pink waves.

...It's taking longer than anticipated for her to run out of air. Roxy lets out another choked noise, her left foot skimming along the ground as she kicks experimentally, and she finally realizes she's not really choking at all. After that initial yank, she's mostly been trembling on her tip toes of her own accord; Jane's fingers aren't tight enough to hurt, let alone leave a mark. Jane watches her expressionlessly with unblinking eyes, the sclera so dark that her bright red irises look like cherry red life saver gummies floating in a black hole.

And if Roxy's got the time and brainpower to make old candy references whilst staring into a girl's eyes, she's not going to die just yet. Which is awesome! She's totally onboard the continue to live bandwagon. Swinging her foot again, she coughs and feels her throat glug against Jane's palm. This close, she gets a whiff of stasis fluid and an aftertaste of electric burn. "Uh. Hi."

Jane cocks her head to the side; she still hasn't blinked. Oh yeah, that's gonna be unsettling.

Rose steps up, friggin' finally, and Jane's eyes flick to look at her without her head moving an inch. "Sentinel. Jane. Her Imperious Condescension is dead. This is Her Imperious Rebellion." Coming from Rose, the title sounds considerably more serious and less try hard than when Roxy says it, and Roxy wonders if there's a trick to making it sound weighty and significant.

Jane gives her the eyeball again, and Roxy smiles like her life depends on it. The amount of unimpressed on Jane's face could dampen the mood of the cheeriest of clowns. But Roxy must pass muster - somehow - and Jane lowers her onto her heels before releasing her chokehold. "She recognizes your authority," Rose says, though Jane hasn't said flapjack all yet.

Roxy stumbles back a step, one hand massaging her throat on instinct, and Jane swoops down on one knee, inclining her head. "Nah, nah, no one bows to me but futzy asshats," Roxy protests. She flails her hands to encourage the girl to stand up, and throws a wild-eyed glance at Rose when Jane's bowed head means the flailing has no effect. Rose does her _own_ bowed head thing of acknowledgement (being Empress is suffering) and then holds out a hand for Jane to take. Once they're both at attemption - aghhhh - attention, Roxy rubs the back of her neck. "You, um. Not much of a talker?"

Rose gives Roxy a _look_. A look that says she has been an obtuse dunderfuck, somehow. "Early on, Jane was...loudly opposed to obeying the Condesce," she says, her voice gone into impassive exposition mode again. "So the Condesce removed her ability to verbally protest. I've been unable to determine whether the block is the result of mental or physical tampering; she has not spoken since."

Well, way to insert that foot right into your mouth, Roxy. Good times, good times. Annnywayyyy. "Niche to meet you," she says to Jane, weakly. Then, to Rose - "That's restrained?"

Rose raises a single eyebrow with pinpoint precision. "Oh, quite so. You are in passable condition, my Empress?"

Roxy has known Rose a grand total of like, ten minutes, but she's pretty sure she knows some bogusness when she hears it. "My condidion is fine," she says. She can feel her speech centers clogging up and stuttering, which is no good. "And on that note, I need some serious advicements. Take five, y'all."

CG: YOU SERIOUSLY HAD BETTER NOT BE DOING WHAT I THINK YOU'RE DOING.  
TG: imma bout to let the third one out  
CG: ADSLNGNOTRLTGGGNLALBLGRTT.  
TT: I know this is a long shot, considering you don't do things halfway, but hear me out:  
TT: Can you not.  
TG: i think theyre a package deal sort of  
TG: just rust me  
TT: I trust you. Not them.  
CG: LOOK, I _KNOW_ YOU HUMANS HAVE YOUR EQUIVALENT OF THE TWO ANGELS OF THE APOCALYPSE INVOLVING HOOFBEASTS OR WHATFUCKINGEVER. WHY DO YOU FEEL THE NEED TO BLOW THE BUTT-TRUMPET AND UNLEASH THIS KIND OF UNMITIGATED BULLSHIT UPON US, OH GREAT AND TERRIBLE LEADER?!  
TG: ur being real snarky over there :/  
CG: 'OH GREAT AND TERRIBLE LEADER' ISN'T SARCASM IN ALTERNIAN, IT'S A PERFECTLY RESPECTFUL TERM OF ADDRESS WITH THE CONDESCE'S OFFICIAL SEAL OF APPROVAL.  
TG: sure snarkat  
TG: neway i just have to never order them to murderize peeps and well never have to worry about it  
TG: simple!  
TT: I can one hundred percent guarantee it won't be that simple.  
TG: s a m p l e  
TG: but also if u dont hear from me in ten min, seal the room  
TG: last minuet will and testamony of great empress ro-lal: dirk gets my stuff+emperor duties, terezi gets my candy stash, and karkat...u always had a nice butt but i didn't want 2 objectify you in front of your kismajinithings  
CG: WHAT. THE FUCK.  
TT: Okay, hell no. Time out.  
TT: We need a second opinion.  
TG: i can handel this!  
TG: no second onions necessary!!  
TT: Do either of us know jack shit about imperial politics?  
TG: were so jacked the fuck into that shit obvi  
TT: Wrong. Everything we've been exposed to in our lives has come from Alternian propaganda, hacked social media, and old Earth filmography. We are not, in fact, qualified to run empires and predict how people will react to us unleashing incredibly overpowered warriors that may or may not be safe to themselves or to others.  
TG: that thars quitter talk  
TT: I'm inviting her to the chat. Captor too, actually.  
CG: MAY FUCK HAVE MERCY ON US ALL. THE FACT THAT YOU CONSIDER TEREZI YOUR HEAD OF IMPERIAL PUBLIC RELATIONS DISTURBS ME.  
TT: She volunteered.  
TT: There also weren't any other applicants.  
TG: she used you as a refrance  
CG: SHE DID _WHAT?!_  
\-- gallowsCalibrator [GC] has joined the chat! --  
GC: OHOHO! 1S TH4T TH3 WORD '4NN1H1L4T1ON' N3XT TO TH3 WORD 'SQU4D' 1 SM3LL? H4V3 YOU B33N HOLD1NG OUT ON M3, 3MPR3SS OF P1NK ROCK C4NDY?  
GC: SUCH 4 PL3THOR4 OF N3W PUN1T1V3 M34SUR3S NOW 4T YOUR CL4WT1PS! 4LL OF TH3M P3RF3CTLY L3G4L D3P3ND1NG ON HOW L3N13NTLY YOU 1NT3RPR3T 1MP3R14L L4W!  
TG: tz pls no  
TG: we follow the intergallactic convention on sentient rights now :(  
CG: IN THEORY.  
TG: if u entertain even a single wiley thot otherwise ill change my color scheme to orange to complement dirk  
GC: NO N33D TO GO 4LL PUMPK1N-Y ON M3! TRULY YOU 4R3 STUBBORN 4ND UNCOMPROM1S1NG 1N YOUR 4L13N S3NS3 OF JUST1C3...  
GC: WH1CH 1S JUST HOW 1 L1K3 IT. >:]  
TG: youre  
TG: welcom ;)  
CG: WHY. WHY DID I HAVE TO LIVE SUCH A FUCKING RIDICULOUS AMOUNT OF TIME. WHY DO I HAVE TO BE ALIVE RIGHT NOW AT THIS MOMENT TO DEAL WITH YOUR REIGN OF WELL MEANING FUCKERY. I'M GOING TO HAVE TO CALL KANAYA AND TELL HER THAT THE MOST DANGEROUS CRUSH SHE EVER HAD IS BACK AMONG THE LIVING AND SHE'S GOING TO BE INSUFFERABLE. WHERE THE BLOODSHITTING FUCK IS SOLLUX, I NEED SUPPORT.  
GC: H3'S SL33P1NG OFF L4ST N1GHT ST1LL. >;]  
GC: OH, 4ND DON'T 4CT L1K3 YOU'R3 TROLL M3THUS3L4H. N1N3TY TWO SW33PS 1SN'T 3V3N M1DDL3 4G3 1N 4 NORM4L L1F3SP4N! YOU'V3 4G3D L1K3 4 M3D1OCR3 W1N3 ♠  
CG: NORMAL FOR ASSHOLES LIKE YOU, I - NEVER FUCKING MIND.  
TT: Can we not devolve into aimless antagonism while there are politics and violations of intergalactic arms control policy at stake?  
TT: Terezi, can you quantify exactly how fucked we're going to be if we set these three free and rehabilitate them?  
TT: The fact that two of them are apparently already on the loose notwithstanding.  
GC: W3LL, 1F YOU'R3 GO1NG TO 4CTU4LLY R3H4B TH3M 4ND R3FUS3 TO US3 TH3M TO 3NFORC3 YOUR GOODY TWO SHO3S R3FORM 3FFORTS? TH3 M41N 1SSU3 1S GO1NG TO B3 D1S4RM1NG YOUR N3WLY 4CQU1RED W34PONS OF PL4N3T4RY 4NN1H1L4T1ON 1N 4CCORD4NC3 W1TH TH3 1CSR PROTOCOLS SO TH3Y C4N'T B3 PROS3CUT3D/CONF1SC4T3D FOR TH3 GR34T3R GOOD.  
TG: i dont think the batterwitch made an off switch 4 their powers tho  
TG: condy still up 2 her tooly ways from beyond the gravy all up in here  
TG: *grave  
GC: SH3 DO3SN'T H4V3 4 GR4VE, YOU F3D H3R 1NTO TH3 SM3LT3RS SO NO ON3 COULD ST1CK H3R BR41N 1N 4 ROBOT BODY.  
CG: MISTAKE NUMBER FUCKING ONE - WE'RE PROBABLY HAUNTED AS FUCK.  
TG: mebbe we can still bury the smelting block on a planet would that count?  
GC: YOU'D H3V3 TO 4SK SOLLUX'S M4T3SP1R1T, SH3'D KNOW 1F SH3'S 1N 4 S34NC3 MOOD.  
GC: BUT H3Y, 1 S4Y GO FOR 1T. 4S LONG 4S 1 C4N ST1LL N4M3DROP TH3S3 THR33 1N C4SU4L CONV3RS4T1ON TO R3M1ND P3OPL3 WHO TH3Y'R3 D34L1NG W1TH. WORD 1S 4LR34DY SPR34D1NG TH4T YOU'V3 FOUND SOM3TH1NG DOWN TH3R3, 4ND TH1S COULD H3LP SC4R3 OFF SOM3 OF TH3 V1OL3TBLOODS TH1NK1NG 4BOUT 4SS4SS1N4T1NG YOU.  
TG: oh for frigglish's sake  
TG: *sake  
TG: *sry sake was right but i was thinkin about alcolols and got the pronunciation confused  
GC: DON'T WORRY. 1'LL PL4Y UP TH3 4NGL3 OF YOU W1NN1NG TH3 4LL3G14NC3 OF TH3 COND3SC3'S MOST POT3NT, UNCONTROLL4BL3 MONST3RS THROUGH YOUR B4D4SS POW3RS 4ND SMOOTH MOV3S. TH3 BLU3BLOODS W1LL DR1NK 1T DOWN L1K3 M1LKSH4K3S!  
TT: As long as Roxy really can control them. All of this is contingent on these three not blowing up the ship under our feet to avenge the Condesce.  
CG: WE'RE DOOMED.  
TG: dont worry i got tihs  
CG: TIHS BACKWARDS IS LITERALLY SHIT. WE'RE SO DOOMED.  
TG: :O hold up tihs is game changing  
CG: I'M CALLING KANAYA. IF ALL ELSE FAILS MAYBE SHE CAN PULL SOME POWER OF LOVE FUCKING BULLSHIT AND SAVE ALL OUR SORRY ASSES, AS USUAL.  
GC: H3H3H3H. GO B3 OUR N1C3, FR13NDLY 1MP3R1OUS R3B3LL1ON, RHOX13, WH1L3 1 H4NDL3 D4M4G3 CONTROL 4ND BU1LD UP YOUR 1NT1M1D4T1NG 4L13N MYST1QUE.  
GC: OH. 4ND N3XT T1M3 YOU COMPL1M3NT K4RK4T'S POST3R1OR?  
GC: W41T UNT1L W3'R3 4LL 1N SOLLUX'S H3LMSBLOCK SO W3 C4N BOTH S33 TH3 LOOK ON H1S F4C3. >:] TH3 COV3T3D OFF1C14L S34L OF 1MP3R14L 4PPR3C14T1ON!  
CG: HA! HAHA! I WELCOME THE SWEET EMBRACE OF OUR NOW INEVITABLE DOOM. BRING ON THE ANNILIHATION.  
TG: there ther karkat  
TG: brbrbrb guys

Roxy tucks the communicator once more, feeling some weird mishmash of conviction and renewed heebie jeebies, and realizes she's got both Jane and Rose staring at her. "Sorry, uh. Long talk," she says, clutching her wrist for a second and laughing awkwardly. When it's clear that the most she's gonna get by way of open judgment is Rose's deadly eyebrow raising maneuver, she coughs and quickly trips over to the last monitor. "Let's crack this bebe open!"

She can't hear Jane's footsteps - Rose's creepy-cool rustling skirts give her away, but Roxy has to double check to make sure she's not getting stealthed on. Jane follows three paces behind and leaves a trail of wet prints on the floor behind her, Rose gliding alongside with a measured expression. Apart from places like her arms where the skin is exposed, Jane's clothes look almost dry already, but Roxy thinks it's less magic wizordry like Rose's and more something similar to her own quickdrying wetsuit. Jane remains implacable under the scrutiny, her expression unlike Dirk's straightfacey shit only in that she has a tiny, tired permafrown. The circuits and lack of color make it hard to tell, but Roxy would bet boonbucks to donuts that Janey has eyebags to make a Zahhak blue with envy.

It takes her way too long to notice Jane and Rose are holding hands. It's mostly covered by Rose's ( _suuuper_ suspiciously convenient) skirt ripples, but definitely happening. She blinks, then goes to tap the console with a quiet pang of guilt over not realizing they were down here sooner.

"One moment," Rose says, interrupting Roxy. The girl walks back to the tea table, her hand falling away from Jane's so natural and sneaky-like that Roxy would have been totally fooled if she hadn't been paying attention earlier. Then Rose runs a finger along the black lace tablecloth, and the whole setup melts like ice cream, which is kiiind of distracting. Slinky purple ice cream runs up under Rose's hand and between her fingers to vanish up her sleeve. It turns insubstantial toward the end, the teapot and fingerwich platters ghosting away like heavy trails of smoke. Heck, it even takes the sandwiches and cookies themselves, which implies something ominous about those snacks that makes Roxy clutch the morsel left in her hand in dawning terror. While Rose is distracted melting everything back into grimdark slurpees and smog, Roxy whips the last bit of sandwich into the furthest corner of the room she can aim for, then slaps her arm back down just in the nick of time.

When she settles back on her heels with a sigh of relief, she realizes Jane is literally _right_ there, and has been watching Roxy instead of Rose this whole time. Rose spins, saying something like, "This may escalate quickly. Her dreams are often restless, and unless you have some form of heretofore undemonstrated psychic talents, you won't be able to assert immediate control the way the former Empress would. You may wish to stay a safe distance away." But Roxy's busy staring in mortification at Jane, who witnessed _that whole thing_.

Jane continues to say nothing.

"That bad?" Roxy says, babbling, belatedly registering what Rose said and dragging her head back around to pay attention. Rose nods, her own serious face firmly in place, and Roxy hisses through her teeth. "Crap. Will this be alright, you think?" She almost does the splits to tap a spot on the floor with her toe, and when Rose agrees, Roxy slaps the monitor and moves her butt into position.

Jade hangs limp on the life support cables long past the point Jane was standing on her own, and Roxy starts to get worried when the last tubes releases her arm with a squelch and Jade just - crumples to her knees, head lolling forward. She looked more alive when she was fidgeting through stasis nightmares, and Roxy, her mouth is a tiny 'o' of worry, has to physically pin one hand against her own chest before she can wander forward to go check if she's okay.

Jade's dog ears flick up, and her nostrils flare. That's all the warning Roxy gets before the room explodes.

She throws her arms up, like they'll do any good warding off a point-blank, neon green explosion, but something else takes the hit and mutes the green light at the same time. The shockwave still makes the floor shudder underfoot and a blast of heat scorches the organic matter covering the walls, but nothing else reaches Roxy. Jane spins Roxy around and buries her in a protective hug, her red eyes staring daggers through the wall of muted, swirling purple shadows Rose has summoned with a wave of her hand.

It's a heck of a lot better than being strangled or exploded into chunky salsa. Once the initial shock passes and the hug ticks over into awkward territory, Roxy starts to get self-conscious, but whatever. Her ears haven't throbbed this hard since she accidentally blasted classic Earth meme videos at top volume in the Condesce's personal media center. "Jade! Jade, she's gone!" Rose is shouting, which is when Roxy realizes that the ringing in her ears is actually resolving into a coherent sound: a shrieking howl of - pain? Rage? Possibly both? The explosion flares and flickers through the shield in time with someone's ragged breathing between screams. "Jade -"

The light lapses, and the normal lighting in the room seems so dim through Rose's shield in comparison that Roxy's left disoriented while her eyes struggle to adjust. Jade streaks past them, a dark-grey blur that rips the nearest console and Rose's tube half out of the floor in a flurry of tearing green slashes. She hits the wall like a battering ram, thrashing and clawing at the wires and meat and leaves pulsing green, cauterized scratches deep in the wall. And all the while, she's screaming like someone's gouging her organs out with an ice cream scoop; the longer the howling lasts, the more it wrenches at Roxy's stomach.

"This should only take a moment, Empress. I beg your patience," Rose says, her voice steady and pitched low to carry below Jade's sobbing screams. Jane stays wrapped around Roxy like cellophane while Rose strides out from under the shield and crosses the room. Another jolt of _force_ shoves out from Jade, a crackling wave that makes the rest of the monitors groan and strain against the layers of organic wire that embed them in the floor. It tosses Rose's hair and sets her skirt cracking out behind her, but the girl herself sails along without deviating from her course. When she nears Jade, woozy green lightning starts sizzling up and down Jade's arms and hands and she whirls to face Rose with her teeth bared. Her hair and tail bristle as she lashes out at Rose with a slap of power - Rose just holds out her hand and waits until the shockwave dies off, unfazed. Roxy, on the other hand, has her feet knocked out from under her even inside the shield, and winds up awkwardly plastered to Jane until she can feel her knees again.

Once it's clear that the attack has failed, Jade lets out another low wail, clutching at her own face and pressing back against the wall in a wild burst of thorny green lightning. "Jade," Rose says quietly. "I'm here. Tell me what will help? What do you need?"

The scream twists and dips lower, less a shriek and more a sound of unmistakable misery. Roxy's knees wobble under her again and Jane's grip tightens on her shoulder to hold her steady - and Jane still hasn't said a word through _any_ of this, so silent it's almost as unsettling as Jade's screams.

Slowly, Jade starts to curl over, still on her feet but bent almost double as though she's in physical pain. Her hair stops hissing with green static and falls to obscure her face, while Rose takes one last step forward, close enough that the lightning arcs out to snap along her own pale hair. Nothing makes her flinch.

And they wait.

Finally, Jade drops one hand from her face, one luminous green eye peering out through her tangled hair as she watches Rose. The scream peters out into a low, wrenching sound, her lips hardly moving as she pulls in breath after thin breath to keep going. After another moment, Jade swallows and puts out a hand to touch Rose's. Rose waits with utmost patience until Jade rests her hand in Rose's before tangling their fingers together. "Where -" Jade starts to say, her voice a hoarse mess. Her eye skitters from Rose to Jane, and then to Roxy, and Roxy tries to wave hello on instinct.

This is a dumb thing to do. Jade slams back up against the wall, and this time she seizes Rose's hand and yanks her along for the ride. Roxy stops waving in a hurry and snatches her hand back, feeling like a total tool. Jade's growl grates like a rolling chainsaw and her ears pin back flat against her hair as she glares at Roxy like disembobblement is on the agenda for today.

Rose falls up against Jade willingly in a casual swoon, fitting her free hand in the crook of Jade's waist. The death grip on her hand means she has to bring Jade's hand along with her own to gently pat the other girl's cheek. "We're both here," Rose promises, holding Jade as if she's about to shatter. "It's alright. We have no orders to leave you. We're all fine."

"Where is she? _What is **she**?!_ " Jade says, distraught; the patches of green galaxy in her skin strobe like rave lights in agitation, and she tears at her own hair while her eye fixes on Roxy like she's a monster. "Ican'tfeelheranywherewhereisshewhereis - _what is that what is she?!_ " Roxy follows exactly none of that, on account of she's standing in plain sight, and gets the impression that Jade's talking about two different people at the same time. Maybe even three! Ambiguous referents suck ass.

Ignoring the fact that the floor around their feet has started to turn into superheated, gloppy sludge, Rose tucks her face against Jade's neck, and starts pressing her thumb in light, gentle circles over Jade's cheek and along her jaw. "The Condesce is dead. She's not anywhere anymore. You can't find her because she's gone," she says, soft and soothing. "Her Imperious Rebellion rules now."

Roxy does _not_ wave this time, just smiles with her lips pressed closed in case that's taken as a threat display. She kinda wishes Rose would stop namedropping the full title, because that's still supposed to be a work in progress and she's starting to wonder if it's got too much staying power and she'll be stuck with it forever. But Rose repeating the words seems to work; the panic in Jade's eyes lapses, and she leans more of her weight on Rose as time goes on, listing to one side, while Rose's hand moves around to massage the base of her neck. The ragged growl slowly dies in Jade's throat, and she looks lost. "...Rose? Jane?" she asks, her voice even more raspy and grating. She tries to look at the side of Rose's face, pressed up close to her own, but Rose doesn't pull away.

"Here," Rose replies.

Jade's knees give out. Rose catches her with one arm around her shoulders, finally disentangling their fingers so that she can ease Jade down onto the bubbling floor without losing her balance. Jade knots her hands in Rose's clothes, her face mostly obscured by Rose's torso as she crumples further, and then she shoves her head into Rose's stomach and - stops. All of her limbs go limp, and she folds up in Rose's lap like a kicked barkbeast, the last of the electric green aura guttering. Rose pulls the other girl in close and cards her fingers through Jade's snarled hair, avoiding the canine ears with careful strokes that stand out all the more for how odd it would be if either of them were a troll - hornbeds are a total moirail thing. Something clots up Roxy's throat as she hears Jade's low, sobbing noises in the quiet room. Ever so slowly, as Jade's sobs even out into deeper breaths, Rose curls down in a light hug, resting her cheek between Jade's jutting, quivering shoulder blades.

The shadow shield trickles down around Roxy and Jane, and then slithers over to rejoin the rest of Rose's inky black, susurrating shadow. Roxy nearly jumps out of her skin when silent, silent Jane moves and slips across the room to join Rose and Jade's huddle. Jane crouches close, her feet positioned around the deeper hollows where the bubbling meat of the floor has popped and cooled, but doesn't quite join the hugpile; she just watches, intent, and after careful consideration, reaches out a hand to quickly touch Rose's brow, Jade's clenched fist. Jade writhes and lets out another quiet wail that makes Jane retract her hand, until Jade settles and Jane drops soft touches on Rose's shoulder - then the tense knuckles of Jade's hand, until they start to uncurl - and then Rose again -

Jade's hand flashes out, and squeezes Jane's hand tight. Jane squeezes right back, bending her head and dropping a kiss on the crown of Jade's head.

Roxy's seen enough pale-rom to recognize a thorough shoosh in action. She's just not used to seeing it up close and in person; Alternians tend to take tender, vulnerable shit to locked rooms where no one can spy on them and stab them in their soft underbellies. Now that she's standing apart and alone in the middle of the room, awkwardness starts to set in damn fast, and she shifts her weight enough to bend one knee and stretch her leg a little, eyeballing the vault door for the first time in what feels like hours.

Before she can make a break for it and uh...give them some privacy to get their pale on, Rose says, "She knows you," quietly muffled in Jane's hair. She's good; _almost_ good enough to hide the broken note in her voice. "We are at your disposal, Empress."

Something clenches in Roxy's belly. "It's Roxy," she says, as cheery as she can manage. "C'mon. Let's get you guys out of here."

TG: good news!  
TG: i live! :P  
GC: OH, 3XC3LL3NT! 1T WOULD B3 4 B1T OF 4 H4SSL3 TO R3PL4C3 YOU 4T TH1S PO1NT. 'H1S 1MP3R1OUS DOM1N4T1ON' JUST DO3SN'T H4V3 TH3 S4M3 R1NG TO 1T.  
CG: REALLY? BECAUSE I'M PRETTY SURE WE WERE JUST BOMBARDED BY THE ULULATING SHRIEKS OF THE DOUBLE-DAMNED, SO I ASSUMED WE WERE ALL COMPLETELY FUCKED.  
TG: jade seems p quiet now  
TT: So they're all cooperating.  
TG: yeh basically  
TG: all kinds of diamonds going on in here  
TG: we might want to find them a place 2 chill that isnt dank vault #713 tho  
TT: These rooms have the highest level of security in the entire ship. Moreover, this vault in particular has most likely been constructed to contain whatever these 'annihilation squad' people can dish out.  
TG: were not makin them live in dank vault #713 dirk  
TG: i mean it  
TT: I know. It needed to be said. But I know.  
TT: The AR is already clearing a route so we run into as few people as possible. Going to try to minimize unnecessary hazards.  
TG: thnk you  
CG: I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'RE FALLING FOR SOME CLICHÉ OVERDONE PALE-ROM TROPE SCENARIO. THEY'RE CLEARLY PLAYING YOU FOR A SAP TO ESCAPE THAT ROOM AND WRECK HAVOC ON OUR UNSUSPECTING ASSES.  
TG: you of all peeps r hardly one to talk  
TG: mr reviews romcoms under a psyeudnonym  
CG: NO, THAT IS EXACTLY WHY I AM ONE TO TALK. BECAUSE I AM ACTUALLY AN EXPERT IN IDENTIFYING CLICHÉ OVERDONE PALE-ROM TROPES. SO HA! I'M SO GLAD YOU RECOGNIZE MY SUPERIER KNOWLEDGE IN THE FIELD, EMPRESS. I DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'VE BEEN SCHOOLFEEDING YOU ON EARTH, BUT I _DO_ REMEMBER THE LAST TIME THE CONDESCE WHIPPED THESE GUYS OUT OF STORAGE. THEY _ATOMIZE_ PEOPLE.  
TG: whatevs  
TG: rose is taking down the wall  
TG: so pls no stabby crabby times 

\---

Roxy knows she's hovering. She helicopters around the room and keeps up a stuttering stream of constant chatter to fill the dead air. Her wetsuit sulks under the dark blue jacket that Dirk tossed to her after they reached the dry upper decks of the _Battleship_ , but Jade stops cringing against Jane's side whenever Roxy crosses her field of vision. She needs to persuade this thing to stop imitating the Condesce's fashion sense ASAP.

Rose accepts her faltering, clumsy attempts at playing hostess with a quirk in her lips and smooth, elegant Earth phrases that Roxy can't stop replaying in her head. From what she's gathered from polling the three of them via Rose, they're _all_ from pre-drowned Earth, their lives prolonged by different combos of technology, wizardy magicks, long periods in stasis chambers, and whatever else the Condesce and her Horrorterror benefactors thought to throw into the mix. Three random girls, plucked up into the sky to be transformed into things that give trolls nightmares.

At least Rose stops hinting that their schedule is wide open for any acts of mass destruction Roxy might want to commit; they don't seem quite sure what to make of the new big E in charge. Jade is quiet and wary, her voice barely more than a husk of a whisper when she's not howling, and the closest Roxy gets to coaxing a full sentence out of her is when she offers them snacks. This suite is one of the sets of rooms where the Condesce entertained alien dignitaries and world leaders whilst her first waves of drones and armies descended upon the planet to strip it of anything sparkly and valuable enough to catch her eye. The low, sleek tables automatically offer up an assortment of beverages based on the inhabitants' biology (Roxy has to pull some fast haxx on the table's AI to stop it from dumping in the preprogrammed narcotic additives, also based on the inhabitant's biology), and the _Battleship_ still has Earth in the database. A tray of piping hot snickerdoodles and neat squares of cheesecake pops out of the wall along with a hot pink milkshake that reeks of helmsman coolant, a mug of hot chocolate, more tea in a gold, glitter-and-gem-encrusted teapot, and a full glass of alcoholic lemonade that Roxy seizes. It has a fancy ass sprig of lavender afloat in the ice cubes next to the curly straw and rubellite embedded around the base. One day, Roxy's gonna poke around the insides of the _Battleship_ and figure out where the effing fuck it stores all the Condesce's goblets and shit, because she has yet to find a room that _can't_ supply her ridiculously gaudy-looking drinks and no one can figure out where they're coming from.

Sometimes, this ship has too much of a mind of its own. Considering what Roxy knows about the helmstrata, she is _deeply_ concerned about what kind of wetware lies buried at the center of the _Battleship'_ s computer systems.

Jane takes the milkshake and starts drinking in steady sips, a mustache of whipped cream slowly accumulating on her upper lip. The sickly sweet smell of coolant get stronger, but Roxy's too busy being charmed by the sweet 'stache, a genuine, lopsided grin touching her mouth for the first time since this morning. Jade only takes the hot chocolate after darting nervous, twitchy looks at Rose and Jane and Roxy, her too-sharp canines peeking out from her lips as she slinks forward and snatches up the mug. She and Rose sit on the plush couch together while Jane stays at attention between them and Roxy. Roxy can't fight the sneaking suspicion that Jane's already somehow on bodyguard duty, despite Roxy telling them they weren't on a mission or anything, and she doesn't know how to make it _stop_. Dirk calls it the Accidental Empress Paradox, because he's got to have a name for everything - she could order everyone to stop obeying her orders and take up a vigorous democracy or something, but then they'd only be doing it because she _told_ them to. Until Karkat barged in to volunteer the renewed loyalty of the threshecutioners and brought his melodramatic swearwords to the table, there didn’t seem to be any middle ground between the people who obeyed Roxy as Empress unquestioningly out of sheer terror and the people who just wanted to kill her.

Becoming Empress was never part of the plan. Yet it continues to happen at an alarming rate, and it takes all her effort to _not_ become a tyrant - the Condesce's safeguards built into the _Battleship_ 's systems ensure that at the very least, the lives of everyone on board are at Roxy's mercy. She and Dirk and the other humans just wanted to dethrone Condy in the hopes that it would behead the empire and clear the way for its subjugated native species to rebound and escape the Alternian Empire's stranglehold. Now, Roxy's got coldbloods prodding her to pick a new sector to feed through the fleet's hungry maw, warmbloods timidly petitioning her for help and getting testy when she can't _do_ much with her mostly-insubstantial power except bluff the coldbloods into acting like not-assholes, and alien delegations out the wazoo hitting her up in the hopes of persuading her not to wreck their shit. That last group has gone through a dramatic population shift since the news of her releasing the annihilation squad hit the grapevine like a metric ton of castiron pumpkins - a lot of ships flew screaming out of the hanger to escape her, while the olivebloods down in communications have received a hundred new docking requests in the past fifteen minutes from people who are 'not happy' about this turn of events. The angry giant alien robot factions waging a war in the next galaxy over are suddenly ignoring her calls, and she can't tell if that means they're pissed, scared, or just inventing new ways to escalate their own civil war while the Alternian Empire stays in its own lane for the first time in a millennia.

She's barely had a year to figure this crap out, and now she's gone and fudged it up. Again.

Imperial politics are hard. It's hard, and Roxy can make twenty different mixed drinks with a gallon of fire wine that _won't_ melt glass, but when it comes to handling the rest of this crap? Heck, the best she and Dirk can do is survive, and hope that everyone else stays too damn wowed by their awesome empress-killing skittles to get _super_ mutinous.

She's a foxy lady of simple needs. She just wants people free and happy and stuff. This shouldn't be so difficult, but...important stuff is never easy or simple. She's not giving up yet.

"'Nyway," she says, tucking the straw into the corner of her mouth so she can talk around it. "How do y'all feel about these rooms? Are these drinks okay? Do you need anything else to eat other than cookies and cake? What's a balanced diet for you guys look like?"

Roxy might as well have asked them what they thought about the price of peas on Persopolis-9. Jane finishes her drink after some of the most intense milshake-chugging Roxy has ever seen and proceeds to pop a cherry into her mouth, chewing it with stoic determination. Jade uncurls from where she's tucked up against Rose's side and gives Roxy a bleary, uncertain look from under her overgrown bangs. Rose at least makes an effort to assess the room décor before granting Roxy a bland, politician's smile. "They should serve well enough, if you mean for this to be our quarters for the foreseeable future. We don't generally spend much time idling outside of missions."

Roxy's shoulders slump. "No, I mean, like - would you _want_ to stay somewhere bigger?" she asks, because she doesn't know how to explain. She tried to explain on the way up here, but words are _hard,_ and she has no idea how she's supposed to help these three regain some semblance of independence when she's stuck keeping them here. One way or another, she let them out of those tubes, and their safety and the safety of everyone around them is all on her. Having a roving squad of experimental weapons of mass destruction is the opposite of a thing Roxy wants. Maybe one of the stodgy, honor-bound nobles who support Roxy out of some wacky sense of loyalty to the Empire will have someone on staff who knows how to disarm these three without killing them, and then they can get, like, therapy. Even if they can't be disarmed, they're getting oodles and noodles of therapy. Therapy from someone who is not a troll, because they call it theragony for a hella good reason. (Alternians take their profession portmanteaus very seriously and very literally, sometimes.) The sooner Jane, Rose, and Jade can be free and make their own choices and learn to live again without Roxy's dumb Empress status hanging over their heads whenever she tries to help, the better for everyone.

Well. Start small. "Or hey, I'm pretty sure the walls' skin has chromatophores, so you can have them be diff colors and patterns. It's totally up to you! There's like, five respiteblocks if you guys want to mix'n'match -"

She sticks the straw back into the center of her mouth and takes a long drink to stop the babble, so they have room to actually, y'know, answer. It's delicious, and she barely feels the burn of alcohol and aw, frick. She's never gonna be able to drink this again - tasty drinks are the most dangerous drinks. Alcohol was something she picked up on a whim; depending on what went into the bottles and packaging, that stuff could last centuries in the aisles of drowned stores, and Roxy swam long hours between rows of glossy bottles, the light from the crumbling ceiling streaming through to make them glitter. For a while Roxy had kind of a problem: one of those ones where you think you're fine and you can still pull off tight hacks and do rogue-y things and live your life and help run a rebel force desperately trying to gather the resources to track down the _Battleship_ of your planet's evil alien overfish, but actually you pass out in the bathroom every night and your BFF has to hold your hair back when you wake up in the morning, and you somehow think it's normal to start the day with a quick drink to make the headache stop and -

Well. She figured it out, eventually. It's still a work in progress, but it's getting better. Better enough that one hard lemonade doesn't make her feel all guilty and crawly and not-good inside, but not better _enough_ that she trusts herself not to make a bad habit of it, given half a chance. Gah.

"I...like this drink, Empress." Jade cringes when Roxy blinks at her. "Y-you asked," she says, halfway between defensive and apologetic. Then, before Roxy can respond, she starts shivering. "I-I - hgk - Emp-"

"That's great!" Roxy says, almost shouting with the force of her sincerity. Jade jumps in her seat, still mouthing choked apologies, and her hot chocolate turns boiling hot in her glowing hands. Rose sets her cup aside and touches Jade's shoulders, trying to judge whether going in for a hug would help, while Jane angles her body so that it's between Roxy and the other two. "That's awesome! Thank you for telling me!" Roxy chatters. She gets the feeling she's doing nooothing to defuse the tension, but she doesn't know what else to do to help. An idea strikes her, though, when she checks Jane's stoic face and finds only a faint frown that tells her nothing. "Let's get you guys all husktops or something, a'ight?"

It's enough of a tangent that Jade shivers and curls her feet back up under her, looking helplessly lost again, and leans into Rose's arm around her shoulders. "Computers?" Rose says, frowning, her accent particularly strong as she rubs soothing circles along Jade's upper arm.

"Yeah! So if you don't feel like talking or can't figure out to make words work or something, like - you'll have something else that might help. And I mean, you guys can't just sit around all day with nothing to do. Don't worry, me and Dirk can totally hook you up with some _classic_ Earth 'ports for the dismaymulators." Roxy can't testify as to how good the translation work is, since the original Earth lang versions often got translated and localized for Alternian consumption, and then had to be translated back out of Alternian if anyone wanted to restore them after the originals were lost from Earth's deteriorating archives. But it'll maybe give these guys some entertainment.

"Don't we have a mission?" Jade looks between Roxy and Rose, bewildered.

Roxy tries to drive it home, for the tenth time since they left the vault. "Nope! No missions! You don't ever have to do any cruddy missions for me, capice? That's official Empress Ro-Lal policy, right there. I promise." She plants her hands on her hips, nodding to herself and then at Jane. "And you don't have to do bodyguard duty anymore! You guys get to retire and do your own thing that isn't killing people from now on."

At fricking last, Jane _looks_ at Roxy, her dark pupils huge in their red rings as she processes this. Her mouth drops open a fraction of a fraction of an inch, the most blatant expression Roxy's seen on her all day. She's still holding the empty milkshake glass, and faint cracks start to spread out along the glass where her fingers apply pressure. Mayyybe not a good sign. But she takes a step closer to the couch, her eyes narrowed as though she's testing whether Roxy will go back on her word and pounce, and like heck is Roxy gonna pull that kind of crapola. She's a dame of her word, dammit. Jane can edge all the way over to the couch if she wants and Roxy will conveniently not say a gosh darn thing about it.

Jade whispers something, just below Roxy's hearing. "...go home?"

Whatever it is, it strikes the other two like lightning - Jane's shoulders jerk, and Rose looks at Jade sharply. "Say wha?" Roxy asks, and this time Jade plucks herself up with a wobbly but resolute expression.

"We can go home?"

Oh.

Shitake mushrooms.

Roxy darts a look at Rose - Rose at least knows about the drowning, they discussed this and Jade was _right_ there, so surely she knows - but also heck only knows what the Condesce put in these girls' heads or what kind of effect living four centuries in stasis and in war might have on their memories - "...You mean Earth," she starts, when Rose casts her gaze down in a supremely unhelpful way. "Uh. Uhhhhhhhhhhh-"

Roxy takes a huge gulp of lemonade. _This_ time she feels the burn, more vodka in one sip than any before, and she sneezes and starts hacking up a lung at the same time. It burns like _shit_. The worst part of semi-sobriety - tolerance has gone down the tubes. How to break the news (again) that your planet got dunked beyond recognition? That all that badass civilization stuff you might remember went down a planet-scale toilet a short while after you got yoinked and turned into an alien weapon? "Hrk - 'bout that -"

"We are aware of the state of things back home," Rose says in a monotone, without looking up from her lap. Roxy nearly inhales another sip of lemonade with the force of her relief. "The Condesce enjoyed replaying the time-lapse videos for us, early on. I expect the _Battleship_ has more important things to do than backtrack halfway along the Orion-Cygnus Arm. We do not seek to inconvenience you."

By the end of that, Rose has taken Jade's fallen hand and drawn it into her lap, squeezing it for comfort while her voice remains damningly neutral. Jade's fading back, her moment of determination dying as she hugs her mug of hot chocolate closer to her chest with a crestfallen expression. Jane doesn't move an inch, and yet the atmosphere in the room still plummets from 'tense' to 'dejected' in the space of four sentences. Roxy has given five terribad speeches since ascending to Empress-hood, and she still hasn't managed to kill a mood as ruthlessly as Rose just did.

But hey. If they already know about the unfortunate post-apocalypse planet part, at least she has good news! "Um, we're actually already on our way back," she says, scrubbing the back of her hair and flashing a shit-eating grin. Jane's jaw drops all the way open; Rose and Jade look up with nigh identical expressions of shock, and Roxy savors it. Hells yeah. She is the bomb. "Dunno what sector Condy was pillaging when you last rained danger on people, but we aren't exactly pushing the borders of Empire anymore. We were gonna swing back by the old watery homestack - homestead, sorry - and drop off anyone who doesn't feel like heading to the Gliese 667 system to whup some butt. So that's totally a thing that can happen!"

Jade claps her hands together, leaving Rose's to fall limp in her lap, perky-eared and starry-eyed in an adorably literal way. "Oh. It feels like it's been forever! I can - I can go and see it? Plants, I had plants, right Rose? I think I remember...maybe they're okay!" she says, all the mistrust and anxiety melting from her face. The fizzy champagne feeling that bubbles in Roxy's chest feels better than being tipsy any day of the week. Rose looks down at her hands, thrown for a loop, and then raises her fingers to touch her lips like she can't believe she's smiling.

"That's exaxly the spirit I'm talkin' about!" Roxy cheers.

Jane drops to her knees, hard. The crunch doesn't sound like bone - more like something metal - and the floor dents under her weight. It takes Roxy's precious time to silently order the room not to unleash nerve gas or send an electric current through the floor in response to the sudden movement; this suite's almost as rigged up with bullshit traps as the Condesce's personal rooms, since she apparently got off on mocking ambassadors while their planets burned, and people tend not to take that well, weirdly enough. As far as she knows, the defense system still has to run everything by Roxy, so it won't just off someone without warning. Jane drops the milkshake glass and it cracks further. Her hands come up in front of her and she hunches her shoulders; it's the most emotion Roxy has seen out of her, ever.

She opens her mouth, and nothing comes out. The silence where words should be sits in the air like a pocket of void.

Slipping off the couch and sliding to the floor, Jade crawls over in a half-crouch - she doesn't spare a glance for Roxy, just skirts around the table and reaches out for Jane with grey hands to clutch her close, with none of Rose's careful pauses or verbal checks. Jane stays mechanically stiff, but doesn't resist, either. Rose walks over to join them, but doesn't stoop to join the hug pile this time; instead, her pale eyes flick to Roxy, and she appears to mull her words over carefully before speaking. "...Thank you, Roxy. Is one of the bedrooms equipped with a recooperacoon? It would be easier on Jade's body."

Roxy's so distracted by the direct use of her name (score!) that she almost misses Rose's total-not-subtleness. "You guys need a break?" she says, once she registers it. "Yeah, I think you just have to ask the room to grow one. Should be easy, they kind of pop out like daisies! And uh, do you or Jane need anything different to sleep on?" she asks, belatedly, wondering just how hard it is to get horror slime out of a regular human bed. 'Coon slime would suck ass for trolls to clean up all the time if the _Battleship_ didn't reabsorb spills through the floor to filter and recycle like a living sponge.

Rose's eyes crinkle in a smile, her thin chest rising and falling in a faint sigh. "I'll be fine," she says. She kneels, one hand drawing Jane's hacked-off hair back from her face so she can cup it. Then she tilts her head to the side, like she's listening to something echoingly silent. "Jane won't need to recharge again for twenty four Earth days, but we...could rest," she says, closing her eyes. "Thank you."

"Right. Right. Then I'll leave you guys to it!" Roxy puts her half-empty glass down, and then backs up, nearly trips, and turns to walk normally to the door. It opens for her without a sound. Another three queries ping her from the room's system, asking if she's _positive_ the inhabitants of the room don't need to be disposed of through the airlock. Roxy would seriously wonder what the frick AR was thinking when he picked this room, but to be fair, _most_ areas of the _Battleship_ live up the Condesce's reputation for ruthless bullshittery. She could beat the crap out of (almost) anyone to challenge her with ancient canniness and tyrianblood strength, but why would she waste time when she had a hellship inundated with her personal aesthetic and ready to leap to her defense with vicious, programmed glee? The throne room is paradoxically the safest place on the ship for people who aren't Roxy - there's nothing in there but the throne, the drains for sluicing fuchsia blood off the floor, and enough open space for Heiresses to challenge their ancestor to a proper duel.

She and Dirk hadn't known how lucky they were to fight the Condesce there.

The last thing she sees as she turns to give one last awkward wave (she _has_ to stop doing that) is the three girls slumped in a cuddleheap, Rose's face completely buried in Jade's hair. The door slides shut behind her, and Roxy snaps and raises a finger at once to stop Karkat before he can get started. His motormouth is already primed and open, the dark grey eye with the scar twitching in anticipation of the shoutfest to come, but Roxy won't have none of that. "Interrupt the shooshtimes at your own peril," she says, gravely, and then she trudges past him to reach Dirk at the end of the hall. "C'mon, leggo. Let 'em sleep. We can do the arguing thing after I get an awesome, decadent bath happenin'."

It doesn't actually work. But Karkat at least holds off until they reach the lift, and for him that's pretty damn reasonable. Roxy flops against Dirk - who's doing his best impression of a disapproving brick wall - twists her hair up into a bun to finally get it out of her face, and feels every bruise from where she hit the floor as they head up to the Empress's penthouse suite.

Going home's gonna be nice, after all this. If nothing else, Roxy thinks, there's three more of Condy's victims who get to give the old batterwitch's ghost a final middle finger by living, and maybe (someday) being happy.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Whoever kills the Condesce doesn't just inherit the Empire, they inherit her monsters too. Specifically, two girls who have been mind-controlled so long they can't remember who they used to be, and the chosen of the horrorterrors, three people who are used to serving as Condy's nightmares for the rest of the universe, trusting each other more than they can trust themselves. And now the new empress (whichever one she is) has to help them get back to being independent people.


End file.
